,
Two stages later things had started going a lot less bad. Spending 4 minutes on the side of the road effectively removed the pressure of competition, letting us focus on the true meaning of rally – driving like assholes without getting arrested. With the exception of a harrowing edge-of-cliff spin on stage two, I seemed to remember how to drive and the car seemed to remember how to haul ass.
On the long transit back to service, we stopped at a gas station for some crappy California pump swill and a few bottles of sugary refreshment. Almost as suddenly as last time, our rally curse returned. For the first time since the re-wire, the car refused to start. It cranked, it made sparks, dinosaur blood coursed noisily through the fuel rail, but the remarkable Otto cycle that so enriches our lives utterly failed to occur. For the first few minutes the failure to start was a mere curiosity. Then it became a diagnostic challenge. Finally, after about 40 minutes, it had completely ceased to be amusing.
This would be a perfect time to point out why you put big batteries in rally cars in spite of the performance-sapping weight. For it was now, as I was finally losing the willpower to turn the key, that the battery still had enough juice to turn the crank and inexplicably fire an injector and make a spark in an appropriate sequence, suddenly breathing life into the cursed mass of aluminum, steel and dirt that had just been taunting us with its inertness.
That minty wave of relief isn’t nearly as refreshing the second time around, but in spite of our tense distrust of the car, it was now running and the clock was ticking louder than ever. The organizers had given us a generous allotment of time to get ourselves to service and we’d now used all but a few minutes of it in a gas station getting heckled by toothless desert dwellers. On the highly-illegal remainder of our transit, it became clear that the engine ran as well now as it did five years ago, notwithstanding it’s unwillingness to start at gas stations. As we screeched and crashed into the service park three minutes late, we formulated a plan to cure the starting problem. We would simply leave the car running for the next 10 hours.
